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The floor of the NYSE is pretty sparsely populated these days. This is true for all the floors of the remaining "traditional exchanges" - i.e .those where much of the trading was done by meat machines (like you and me) instead of silicon machines.

So it was a good day for traditionalists and good old denizens of the floor on Tuesday when Seaworld went public and decided to mark the occasion by letting a few of their penguins (employees? independent contractors? capital equipment?) have the run of the NYSE floor. By the looks of the picture, this brought more of a crowd out there than we've seen for a while.

Source: WSJ

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) did not approve. The WSJ Headline read "PETA Rips NYSE over Penguins". PETA doesn't approve of much. They have a point on what a lousy job it is to be a Veal-in-training or a factory chicken, but these penquins look to be pretty "free range" to me. Seaworld also had a decent IPO, dropping only 0.2%, so they'll get to use 99.8% of the proceeds to buy more fish for the penguins, whales, dolphins and other slippery attractions that Seaworld is keeping off the menu at various illicit sushi bars that might otherwise put them on your menu.

Those you who have the pleasure of owning a copy of Nerds on Wall Street, my amusing yet allegedly informative book on modern markets, know that it features a photo collection of critters on trading floors. While these were not all that hard to get when I got them (by asking for them) way back when, a couple of unfortunate fires and archive closings have made them scarce. I've even had some of the people who sent them to me call and ask for copies of the copies.

So PETA, here we go:

First Day for Turkey Futures, CME 1961.

Futures started out being mostly about agricultural assets, thus these pictures come from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The are no good pictures for the VIX or the S&P 500 futures which dominate trade there now. There are more critters though....

Hog Futures, Day One at the CME, 1966

Not to be tied down to actual running-around phyiscals, as they say in the futures biz, in 1970 the CME introduced another form of derivative, futures on Boneless Beef.

Boneless Beef Futures Begin Trading, CME 1970

Notice the same happy guy in these pictures, Ev , then president of the CME, whacking a gong with a salami (a stand in for real boneless beef, which would mess up the gong and Ev's nice suit).

Crowds of a certain age, mostly people old enough to remember black and white TV and when brokers spread more jokes than the Internet, really like these pictures, especially after a few drinks. They even sell a few books. If you don't like 'em, have a few drinks and try again. But be careful, some web optimizer will try to sell you turkeys, pigs, booze and salami just for reading this.